Just wishing you and yours a memorable Valentine's Day. We are snowed under here in Upstate New York (Binghamton, New York is where I am), so it's a good day to listen to a lot of good music, write reviews (between shovelings) and pay special attention to your sweetheart! I heard today that even Atlanta, Ga. had television pictures of what's happening here. Banks have closed, the University and all schools have shut down. I've seen one or two cars travel along the deep snow-covered street. No doubt many of you are experiencing the same thing in the North East.

A good snow fall began this morning. Quite beautiful actually! But, Lance, my sweet heart is in Washington, D.C., for the whole week It'll have to be a Valentine's Day hug and kiss over the phone Thank you and I guess I'm doing what you're doing.

In the eyes of those lovers of perfection, a work is never finished—a word that for them has no sense—but abandoned....(Paul Valéry)

We even had a pretty heavy snow here in Albuquerque. Most everything is closed except the federal bankruptcy court.

Don't drink and drive. You might spill it.--J. Eugene Baker, aka my late father
"We're not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term."--Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S. Carolina."Racism is America's Original Sin."--Francis Cardinal George, former Roman Catholic Archbishop of Chicago.

I ain't got doo-squat for my wife....I'm doomed... ....not really doomed...she already knows I ain't got doo-squat for her...my gift last year was so good, I've been forgiven in advance for this year's dearth

johnQpublic wrote:I ain't got doo-squat for my wife....I'm doomed... ....not really doomed...she already knows I ain't got doo-squat for her...my gift last year was so good, I've been forgiven in advance for this year's dearth

What could you have possibly given to her last year that would make up for this year? Please do tell!

Some people don't celebrate the day at all. It is, after all, only one of those days to help keep the economy going. If you're like me, you ARE the perfect valentine every day of the year! (Ahem! Don't believe it!)

While Germany's still experiencing its mildest winter in well over 100 years (today's high will be 11 degrees centigrade, c.a. 52F), Heidi and I are still attending lots of concerts. We've had one small snowfall this season in our area (Mannheim/Heidelberg) and it didn't stay on the ground for long.

Twenty years ago, Germans didn't know anything about Valentine's Day, nor did they know Hallowe'en. Now the shops are full of beautiful flower and chocolate combinations, t.v. stations bombard one with ads for it, as well as pumpkins and American horror films on t.v. at Hallowe'en.

If it's American, it all comes over here eventually---even that awful rap (hopefully, tho' NOT the love for guns!).

Even an occasional symphonic work of Ives, Piston, Copland or Barber hits the air-waves now and then.....

Don Juan is disgusted. Cassanova is crushed. Pyramis and Thisbe are beside themselves; Romeo and Juliet are inconsolable. Eloise and Abelard? Aghast.

Dante? Don't ask.

We have failed them all. We have sold the hopeless romantics down the river. We have taken the fragile, tender blessing that those blissful souls once bestowed upon us and we have crushed it like a rose petal beneath an Ugg boot.

Don't pretend you don't know what we mean.

Love in the 21st Century is a joke. It's a scam. It's a punch line in a sitcom. It's an e-mail with a lame smiley face in place of an original phrase. It's a hasty text message (LUV U) with a hieroglyph where your heart ought to be. When it comes to love, nobody knows what to say or to write anymore.

Are we too busy? Too preoccupied? Yes, love is a many splendored thing, but these days that just sounds like more multitasking.

Or could it be that this age of coy cynicism and corrosive sarcasm has finally managed to yank the rug right out from under eternal passion? Has the arch irony of "The Daily Show" and films by the Farrelly brothers finally done in the idea of romantic devotion?

Here, plucked at random, are samples from this year's V-Day card stock:

"It's Valentine's Day and my heart's all aflutter!" asserts the cover of one card. Open it, and the deflation comes fast: "Stupid coffee." Or there's the one with the tiger whose big eyes roll around while he growls, "Rowrrrr! -- you STILL got it!" -- adding inside, "And I STILL can't keep my paws off it!"

Or this: "Q.: How beautiful can you get? A.: So beautiful, whole bouquets get jealous."

And then there are the cards that seem to be designed exclusively for the partners of con artists, serial killers or President Clinton: "I love that you married me, knowing that it wouldn't be simple, that living with me was unlikely to be a walk in the park." The card's interior text is a study in oblique understatement, praising "all the fun and struggle and change -- this sweet complicated togetherness of ours."

Thus for Valentine's Day missives, one apparently is forced to choose between messy mush and smart-aleck one-upmanship, which is really no choice at all.

Not to mention the Internet sites that offer to provide you with an instant, personalized greeting for your sweetie, a service eerily reminiscent of the wares of those online firms selling term papers to harried undergrads. Can you really plagiarize your way into someone's elusive heart? Cut-and-paste your subcutaneous desires?

What happened, we are forced to wonder, to such fresh and glorious love poetry as that penned by those 17th Century British rhymesters Robert Herrick or Andrew Marvel? To sparkling sonnets and idiosyncratic cravings? To lines such as Marvel's "Had we but World Enough, and Time,/This coyness Lady were no crime . . . " or Herrick's inimitable "When what is lov'd is present, love doth spring;/But being absent, love lies languishing"?

These are questions we are forced to ponder on Valentine's Day 2007, as computers and complications ensue, as romance recedes ever further from our glimpse and our grasp.

We want to love as in days of old -- but this is a new world, and a cold and hectic one. We want to find words that make us burn and suffer the delicious torments of unbridled affection. Instead, we just stand there in the card aisle at the bookstore, before those steeply raked rows of manufactured sentiment, and we sigh and pine for what's not present.

We want what poet Mary Oliver is talking about in her book "White Pine":

There isn't anything in this world but mad love. Not in this world. No tame love, calm love, mild love, no so-so love. And, of course, no reasonable love. Also there are a hundred paths through the world that are easier than loving. But, who wants easier?

Beautifully written article, Ralph - and so true from my observations of watching many Valentine's Days pass. These "special days" seem to have not much meaning any more. We let others write the sentiments that should be from our own hearts, and we send or say the things that people want to hear because it is expected. It's the same for other holidays, such as Christmas, Veterans Day, etc. For most, these represent just another day off from work. It's all become far too commercial, and we are, indeed, living in a fast-paced society. If you forgot to get your sweetheart a card on the way home from work, you can send her a "special" e-card, provide music with it, and if you forgot the dozen roses, you can even put the graphic in to provide the virtual flowers. It's becoming the accepted way of life. Times change. What you don't know you can't miss. I fear for the young people of today in just about all areas of living and working. As we, the older ones die off, who will impart the knowledge of a better way of living and loving to the younger set? The examples will all be fading away with each passing year and decade.